Desert Foxtrot

by Charles Rice Goff III

1 Saddam Votes For Impeachment

2 Rationalizing Bloody Gore

On December 16th, 1998, US President William J. Clinton ordered a surprise attack on Iraq which the US military dubbed: "Operation Desert Fox." Over the course of four days, missiles and bombs launched from hundreds of aircrafts and sea vessels rained down on Iraq. Clinton ordered this attack on the eve preceding a scheduled vote to impeach him by the US House Of Representatives. The attack forced the representatives to delay their vote; however, several of them, and several senators as well, refused to back Clinton's deployment of military force in this instance because of its suspicious timing.

Outside of the US, only Britain joined in the attack. Russia, France, and China angrily reacted to the military action by calling for an end to the Iraq oil embargo that had been imposed by the United Nations eight years earlier and by demanding that the UN commission in charge of monitoring Iraq's compliance with post Persian Gulf War cease fire agreements be dismantled.

At least 1,400 Iraqis died in the attack; many more were injured.

As the news of Desert Fox began to circulate through the media on December 16th, Charles Rice Goff III felt frustrated and angry. He channeled his anger through sound. Using audio mixers, he pumped several feeds of live television reports into a four-track cassette deck, distorting the various spewings of facts, opinions, rationalizations, and advertising sponsorships with sound effects and on-the-fly editing. For much of the night, Goff improvised an angry collage over this bed of media noise, injecting it with a distorted electronic guitar, a Micromoog synthesizer, and a number of oddly-played phonograph records. In early 1999, Goff culled out an hour from this recorded audio tantrum and released it on the Taped Rugs cassette album: "Desert Foxtrot."

The following words appear on the cover art of the cassette album:

"The sounds on this tape are the live and immediate gut reactions of C. Goff III to the events and media reports of 12/16/98. No overdubbings -- a bit of editing. Just how would the Iraqi people feel about us if we spent our defense dollars to feed and clothe them? Is the act of killing innocent people with expensive bombs an impeachable offense?"

Also in 1999, Goff expressed his frustration with US foreign policy by self-publishing a small booklet entitled: "Loopynanda's Lexicon Of Military Lingo Jingo." Goff, in the guise of Swami Loopynanda, "defines" several commonly used military terms. As one might suspect, these definitions are somewhat Dadaistically satirical. The book illustrates its definitions with thought-provoking images of Goff's head superimposed on the bodies of comic book soldiers. A PDF file of this booklet is included in this archive. Printing the pages back-to-back in the order that they appear (page one backed by page two, page three backed by page four, etc.) and folding them together in half will produce a copy of the booklet as it originally appeared.


copyright 1999
by Taped Rugs Productions
www.tapedrugs.com




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